Technology, Culture, and Ethics

In the works …

For some time now I’ve entertained the idea of compiling some of what I’ve written here over the last three years and turning it into an e-book. In part, I’m motivated by the desire to give the work I’ve put into this blog a more finished and enduring form – or, at least what would feel like a more finished and enduring form. I’ve also been intrigued by the process of putting together an e-book and thought it might be interesting to experiment with it. And, of course, it would be disingenuous of me if I didn’t also admit that I’ve wondered whether putting together an e-book might not help finance what remains of grad school. My expectations on that count are, I assure you, quite modest. In any case, entertain the idea is pretty much all I had done with it. Until recently that is.

I’ve been inspired by Jeremy Antley to finally undertake the project. Jeremy is a thoughtful and articulate scholar of Russian history, games, and digital culture who blogs at The Peasant Muse and has written for some of the same online venues I’ve contributed to over the last couple of years. His post on the process of putting together an e-book was tremendously helpful and made the whole thing seem easy enough for me to give a it whirl. I picked up his book at Amazon, and you can also find it at gumroad.

So I’ve been working on a collection I’m tentatively titling The Tourist and the Pilgrim: Essays on Life in a Digital Age. I’m hoping to make it available in the next few days. All of what will be gathered therein, at least in its original form, has been and will remain freely available on this site. But those of you who would appreciate a collection of the better work that’s passed through these pages and an opportunity to support that work, stay tuned, it’s forthcoming.

Update:

One more, possibly oddball thought. I imagine this is the sort of thing a publisher would traditionally do, so this might be a little weird, but, whatever, these are weird times: If you’ve been reading The Frailest Thing for awhile and would be interested in giving me a “back cover blurb” sort of endorsement drop me an email at LMSacasas at gmail dot com. Cheers!

Excellent idea! I just used CreateSpace through Amazon for my latest poetry collection. Basic services were free; I paid $25 extra for expanded distribution, and there are both digital and print copies available this way. A fellow writer said he also uses BN.com’s PubIt for digital. Just some ideas. I stumbled across a POD review through a quick Google search that listed many POD publishers with a serious critique and comparison guide on booksandtales.com.

I’ve also heard you can use mobi or similar software to publish your own ebook and sell it from your site.

This is great news and I will certainly purchase this book. A few other leads for producing ebooks: If you go through Amazon for sales you might want to also use their CreateSpace service, which I’m told by colleagues is very easy to use, includes POD, and is free. Also, if you’ve been authoring in WordPress, you might want to try the Anthologize plugin for gathering, organizing, and exporting everything to various formats. However it gets done, I’m very much looking forward to it. Good luck!

Sounds great, Michael. I look forward to purchasing it. I followed your link to Jeremy Antley’s e-book, and bought a copy, which looked to be well done. One point that comes out for me, as I read the PDF version (also great to have epub format as well) of Antley’s “Thoughts” is that its nice to have a version of each essay that doesn’t have comments attached to it. I guess that as you write blog posts, its really nice to have the interaction via comments, but its also useful as an author to be able to create a version of your text that stands apart from those comments. You can unbundle the text from the commentary.

In any case, keep up the good work, and I look forward to continuing to read!
best regards,
Boaz

Agreed, the stripped down reading environment makes a difference. I’m noticing that even as I prepare the document. It’s also why I’m even trying to minimize the hyperlinks in the text. Although, I have to say, your comments happen to be among the best this blog gets!

Hi Mike,
I just got the e-book, and am really enjoying it so far!
One thing I noticed is that you didn’t include references to the dates of the original posts on your blog. Maybe you thought that through and decided it would clutter it too much, or would rather see the edited essays as independent, but somehow dates seemed missing to me. Otherwise, the typesetting, and everything looks great!
Boaz